Your customers need to know where you are.
For online businesses, this means making sure customers can find your website, social media accounts, Google Business Profile and other digital contact points.
For brick and mortar businesses, this also means letting your customers know where your physical location is, how to get there, and anything they need to know when they arrive.
This seems straightforward enough, but how do you tell your customers where you are without being repetitive and in a way that’s engaging?
1. Utilize Landmarks and Anchor Stores
In the US, shopping malls have been built around “anchor stores” since the 1950s. These are usually large, popular stores like supermarkets, department stores and big box retailers that serve as a long term, consistent draw for customers. The smaller businesses surrounding them benefit from the traffic.
You can harness this idea on social media by reminding customers you are located in the same shopping center, across the street or otherwise right near an anchor store–any well known, big name business that’s nearby.
Similarly, you can use public landmarks like schools, libraries and parks to give your customers an easy-to-remember way to find you. Most of us can look up directions on demand on our phones, but providing an update that can get customers in your door without having to Google it means you’re doing things the right way.
2. Collaborate With Neighbors
Working with your neighboring businesses can help indirectly tell potential customers where you are. The easiest way to do this is to patronize your neighbors and share a post where you mention and tag them.
You can also work with these neighbors to create a community event that will help you all—an outdoor market or a fundraiser for a local school or nonprofit, for example. You could collaborate on a “business crawl” that turns visiting each neighboring business into a game with a “passport” or checklist, and each participating location has a giveaway or discount for the people that come through. These are all great ways to market your business in general, but they also serve to share your location.
3. Invite the Question with an External Photo of Your Storefront
A great external photo of your storefront on a beautiful day is always an invitation to visit when shared on social media. When you pair this with the right caption, it’s an invitation for customers to ask for your address.
In your caption, the best approach is to acknowledge the beautiful day and aesthetics of your storefront and mention that you’re open, excited and ready to help customers. In this case, you don’t include your address or directions in the post, but provide it when asked in the comments.
This is not a foolproof, automatic way to get engagement (nothing is) but it is a good idea to try. When it works, you’re also boosting your engagement and that will, in turn, help your post reach more people on that platform.
4. Help Customers Avoid Roadblocks (Literally and Figuratively)
Is your brick and mortar business not easy to find or get to? If your business isn’t on a major street, has a limited or difficult parking situation, or isn’t easily visible or accessible from the street, these are all things you can post about to make your customers’ lives easier.
If you don’t share this information up front, when customers try to visit and run into trouble, some people will simply give up and go somewhere else. Even if they don’t need help, your customers and potential customers will be grateful that you’re trying to be helpful. Basically, you want to make it as easy as possible for them not only to find you, but to physically get inside your door.
Even if your business is easy to find and doesn’t have parking issues, you will still face challenges that are outside of your control. For example, if there’s bad weather, road closures, power outages or construction nearby that is rerouting traffic, all of these can impact your potential customers. You can create a post or reshare information about both your neighborhood and wider community–even if the problem is not directly in front of your business, like something happening down the street, around the corner, or on a nearby major road.
5. Talk About What Makes Your Business Unique in its City, Region or State
Most of these ideas are centered on your physical location and its immediate surroundings, but you could also relay your general location by talking about it in relation to the city, region or state that you’re in.
One way to do this is to highlight something about your business that makes you unique in that area; for example, you might be the only place that sells a certain product or service within 100 miles of where you are.
This is also an opportunity to engage in a little bit of hyperbole about your business–as long as it comes across as genuine excitement. For example, if you think you’re the best in the industry in the state for example, you could post about that. That becomes an indirect invitation to visit your business, it shares your relative location, and it gives customers a reason to look up your address and visit you.
6. Take Advantage of Signage
The signage around your physical location is a fun and easy way to share your location. You could snap a photo of the street signs at your nearest intersection, your shopping plaza sign, or any iconic signage nearby (i.e. a historic theater marquee or town welcome sign) and pair it with a caption about your civic pride and/or involvement in the community.
In the example pictured, one of our clients was located in a popular plaza but was upstairs with a rear entrance not visible from the street, so the plaza’s sign was a great way to help people find it.
7. Create a Pictorial Map
A pictorial map is a kind of illustrated map that is used to highlight points of interest in an area. These maps are often made for tourists, the kind of thing a chamber of commerce or visitor bureau would make to promote their community. These would be a better alternative to a screenshot from Google Maps or a posting link to those same directions.
You can make a simple one that shows your business in relation to cross streets and landmarks using a tool like Canva, which has easily customizable templates of these kinds of maps. Here’s an example we created for a client for social media.
8. Put Yourself on the (Tourist) Map
Piggybacking on the pictorial map idea, if your business is included in tourist maps for your area, that’s definitely something you want to share. A solid caption would express your pride and excitement about being featured as a highlight of your community, ideally highlighting some of those neighbors you’re collaborating with and all the great things to do. Even if your business wasn’t on the actual map, you could mark its location with an emoji or by hand and share your “enhanced” version on social media!
Similarly, if there’s a community or public event happening in your immediate area (a parade, festival, high school football game, etc), you can post about that. Sharing content about your community is always a good strategy, and it serves as another way to relay your location.
9. Use the Power of UGC
User-generated content (UGC) is the content created by others that references your business, either by directly tagging your account, location or mentioning you without doing so. UGC is social media marketing gold–there is very little you can post yourself that is more powerful, more engaging and more likely to bring in customers than having a third party hype up your business.
This is the heart of the best of social media–people helping each other by providing recommendations, promoting local businesses, and supporting their community. In fact, your physical location will ironically help you find UGC because of the location tags you find on many social media platforms. Search for your location, open the link, and see what your current and potential customers have been saying about you in their own posts.
Conclusion
Sharing logistics—your basic business information like address, contact information, operating hours, how to place orders, etc—should be a regularly occurring piece of your social media strategy. If you’ve updated your profiles properly, you’ve done the prerequisite work. The ongoing work will be posting it regularly in a variety of ways as outlined above.
